Deuteronomy 8:7-18
Community Thanksgiving Service
Phoenixville: Sacred Heart RC
In the play Shenandoah, a farmer in Virginia sits down at the head of the table
where his family is gathered and they all reverently bow their heads as he
prays,
“Lord, we cleared this land. We plowed it, sowed it, and harvest it. We cook the harvest. It would be here and we wouldn’t be eating it
if we hadn’t done it all ourselves. We
worked dog-bone hard for every crumb and morsel, but we thank you, Lord, just
the same for the food we’re about to eat, amen.”[1]
That’s the attitude that the book of Deuteronomy [8:11-14,
17-18] tries to warn us against.
“Take care that you do not forget the Lord your
God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes,
which I am commanding you today. When
you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have
multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is
multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your
God, … Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have
gained me this wealth.’ But
remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you
power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your
ancestors, as he is doing today.”
It’s rare that anyone puts it as baldly as the father in Shenandoah, but it is nonetheless a
common way of thinking.
You can
hear it in the way that some people call tomorrow “Turkey Day”. That’s not to say that turkey will not be on
our minds from early in the day. That
and pumpkin pie. And mashed potatoes. And stuffing.
With gravy. And those string
beans with the crunchy onion things on top, and cranberry sauce on the side,
and maybe some apple sauce with cinnamon.
Of course, there will be rolls with lots of butter and maybe some sort
of alternative protein source for that cousin who wears a lot of natural
fibers. It will be the turkey whose
aroma fills the house, though, and at some point we will also be filled with
the awareness that we live in
“a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and
underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines
and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without
scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from
whose hills you may mine copper.”
[Deuteronomy 8:7-9]
There is nothing wrong with that. But if it is “Turkey Day” and not
“Thanksgiving Day”, then we have missed the point.
We
live in a society that teaches us to admire the “self-made” person. We are taught to admire the one who does all
that they can do to become “successful”, which is generally understood to be
the same as “wealthy”. Yet even Ralph
Waldo Emerson, someone who did not identify success with money, still went on
at great length in his overblown, Victorian way, about how
“There is a time in
every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance;
that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as
his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of
nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of
ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in
nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know
until he has tried.”[2]
The American hero, from the earliest days, has been
someone like Ben Franklin, who ran away from Boston as a teenager and landed in
Philadelphia with almost nothing in his pocket, but built up a printing
business and eventually became ambassador to the court of Louis XVI and flirted
with Marie Antoinette. It’s the same
general story as the one about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak starting Apple
Computers from nothing and making it what it is now. It’s the same story as Oprah, the
disadvantaged and abused child who made her way to a television studio in
Chicago, became a reporter, then got her own show, and went on to become the
fount of wisdom who also gives away cars.
Look
into their full biographies and you will find, along with all the hardships and
challenges, the people who helped. You
will find Ben Franklin’s father-in-law, another printer who helped set him
up. You will find that when Steve Jobs
officially dropped out of college, his friends let him stay in their dorm rooms
and his teachers let him keep auditing classes.
You’ll see that Phil Donahue saw the potential in Oprah Winfrey and
served as her mentor. Yes, people work
hard and talent counts a lot. No one,
however, is totally “self-made”.
Beyond
it all, too, are the gifts of God that we all, whether we recognize it or not,
depend upon.
“Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand
have gained me this wealth.’ But
remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you
power to get wealth…” [Deuteronomy 8:17-18]
Toward the end of the play Shenandoah the same character who opened
it with a self-congratulatory prayer has lost two sons and a daughter to the
Civil War. He tries to offer the same
words of prayer, but they leave his mouth with a lot less conviction. He hasn’t been able to protect his family or
to keep the world and its violence at arm’s length and he is beaten down. The amazing thing is that in his humbled
state, the part where he says,
“We worked dog-bone hard for every crumb
and morsel, but we thank you, Lord, just the same for the food we’re about to
eat”
comes across as far more genuine. You get the sense that he’s been held
together by a power far greater than his own, which is pretty much gone.
That
is far closer to the spirit of Thanksgiving, a holiday that our national
mythology traces back to people who had struggled through their first year in a
strange land, during which 26% of the children, 52% of the men, and 70% of the
women among them died of cold, disease, and starvation.[3] Those who survived did so only with the help
of the natives with whom they unwittingly shared smallpox, which made it easier
to take over the land. Even so, it was
those two groups who sat down together to feast when it became possible and to
give thanks. It has to do with
recognizing that what we have, great or little, is from God. It is saying, with the prophet Habakkuk,
“Though the fig tree does not blossom,
and no fruit is on the vines;
though the produce of the olive fails
and the fields yield no food;
though the flock is cut off from the fold
and there is no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will exult in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
and makes me tread upon the heights.”
and no fruit is on the vines;
though the produce of the olive fails
and the fields yield no food;
though the flock is cut off from the fold
and there is no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will exult in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
and makes me tread upon the heights.”
[1]
from Shenandoah
by James Lee Barrett (1965), cited at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059711/quotes
[2]
from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance” (1841). http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm
[3]
Figures taken from George Willson, Saints and Strangers: Being the
Lives of the Pilgrim Fathers and Their Families (New York: Reynal and
Hitchcock, 1945). Cited at http://college.cengage.com/history/primary_sources/us/Mortality_Plymouth_Plantation.htm
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